Album Anniversaries: 25 Years Ago, A Demo Tape Launched Dave Grohl’s Second Act
On July 4, 1995, one of rock’s biggest bands officially debuted. Foo Fighters dominate rock radio and fill stadiums today, but it all started with a lo-fi demo tape Dave Grohl recorded on his own.
In Album Anniversaries, writers honor their favorite aging albums and their subsequent legacies, revealing which projects have stood the test of time.
Written by Carys Anderson
Photo courtesy of Mick Hutson/Redferns
By the time a 25-year-old Dave Grohl entered the studio in October 1994 to record some demos, he had already been in the biggest band in the world. And that band had already imploded.
Grohl, a lifelong punk rocker, cut his teeth in the Washington, D.C. hardcore scene, where he learned about DIY culture from local legends like Minor Threat and toured the world with scene veterans Scream. In 1990, he left for Seattle, where a little band called Nirvana needed a drummer.
Grohl was there when punk rock broke. With Nirvana’s landmark album Nevermind, the basic tenets of punk — three chords, played with abandon, a fiery expression of rage, and generally unmarketable inner turmoil — had fused with pop hooks into something that could reach the mainstream. Soon enough, Nirvana went from being the protégés of Sonic Youth to the Billboard competition of Michael Jackson and the musical guests of Saturday Night Live. And while band leader Kurt Cobain, who quickly became the “tortured genius” face of a musical movement, resisted success and longed to remain underground, Grohl, a flailing torrent of hair behind the drum kit, enjoyed relative anonymity from the back of the stage.
Suddenly, “grunge” — the media’s term for Seattle’s style of sludgy rock — was chic. A slew of otherwise sub-par bands that had mastered the formula of angsty lyrics, gritty vocals, and distorted guitars were signed to major labels looking to cash in, and as the audience grew, the genre of individuality no longer existed as a haven for misfits. Cobain was so disgusted that his music appealed to regular old macho men that he adorned the liner notes of the 1992 compilation album Incesticide, the band’s first release since pop stardom, with a request for all racists, sexists, and homophobes to “Leave us the f-ck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”
Cobain’s struggles with fame, mental health, and substance abuse culminated in his April 1994 suicide, an abrupt end to the musical revolution he helped initiate. Where was the industry to go from there?
The answer, it turned out, was Foo Fighters.
No one really knew then that Grohl had been writing songs since he was a kid, quietly working with his friend and fellow D.C. punk, the producer Barrett Jones, to put his ideas to tape. Most of these experiments went unheard — Grohl has said he was insecure about his abilities, and figured he’d leave the songwriting to his gifted bandmate. But after three fever dream years of TV appearances and headlining festival sets screeched to a halt, he gathered the best of his material and got to work.
Recorded in a week with every instrument credited to Grohl himself, Foo Fighters is a portrait of DIY writ large. Intended as therapy more than anything else — a way for the musician to dip his toes back into playing after Nirvana’s sudden, brutal demise — the record is unpolished and unassuming. Its only sequence is the order in which it was recorded; its name was an attempt to hide Grohl’s identity. A record company bidding war ensued when word got around that the drummer for Nirvana could play guitar — only then did Grohl decide to form a band and give the tape a proper release.
Image courtesy of Roswell Records
An album of concrete hooks yet unsure, youthful vocals, it’s clear that Grohl’s pop songwriting talent had already solidified. But Foo Fighters isn’t slick like the rest of the band’s stadium-ready catalog; its crunchy guitars and thundering drums are plain and unmasked, its lo-fi feel a reminder of the band’s humble beginnings. The album straddles the line between two eras, compiling the last remnants of grunge while laying the groundwork for a more radio-ready style of rock that would define the next millennium. It’s a time capsule of mid-’90s transition.
Opener “This Is A Call” is all quirky, jangly guitar and hammering drums, right away more upbeat than any Nirvana number. But the bitter “I’ll Stick Around” follows, with a driving riff and lyrics aimed directly at Courtney Love, Cobain’s widow. The song bites with lines like “How could it be I’m the only one who sees your rehearsed insanity” and “I’ve been around all the pawns you’ve gagged and bound,” not to mention the chorus — in which Grohl simply yells, “I don’t owe you anything.” Decades later, now that the famously good-natured Grohl has a reputation as the “Nicest Man In Rock,” this rare display of vitriol is still one of his strongest compositions.
These two songs were the album’s first and second singles, and became the foundation on which all Foo Fighters songs would build, to varying results. Grohl proved early on he could write a hit, but more importantly, the one-two punch of the songs’ lyrics — “This is a call to all my past resignations” to “I’ll stick around and learn from all that came from it” — show a man on a mission to survive.
Dig beyond these alternative-era staples and Foo Fighters grows more layered, a space where all of Grohl’s far-reaching influences combine. The cheesy love song “Big Me” recalls early Beatles, while “Oh, George” is a tribute to George Harrison himself. “Good Grief” fires on all cylinders with galloping power pop, and “Floaty,” Grohl’s rousing take on shoegaze, ropes you in with its insistent riff. Inspired by the band Lush, the punk’s attempt at a “pretty” song is still loud, a crash of cymbals interrupting its acoustic beginning. Despite the volume, however, Grohl somehow still soothes; “Floaty” chugs along in circular motion, quickly repetitive but too upbeat to grow tiresome.
Elsewhere, “For All The Cows” is sleazy, sarcastic bar rock that perfects the quiet-loud-quiet dynamic formula Nirvana popularized. “I’m called a cow / I’m not about / To blow it now / For all the cows,” Grohl smirks, his drums a simple metronome before the song takes off. In an album mostly full of nonsensical lyrics — Grohl has said he had little time in that six day recording window to wax poetic, and didn’t want his songs to be interpreted as Cobain commentary — it’s hard to tell if any of his words mean anything. But when he yells in that chugging chorus that “My kind has all run out,” and muses that “It’s funny how / Money allows / All to browse / And be endowed,” you can picture his confusion as he and his fellow punk rockers began being treated like cash cows by the music industry.
Photo courtesy of Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty
Foo Fighters shifts moods at the drop of a hat. “Weenie Beenie” and “Wattershed” are all guitar snarl and muddled screams, two blazing love letters to the music of Grohl’s youth. Soon enough, however, he placates this blitzkrieg with the droning lullaby “X-Static,” his voice only a murmur, his drums slowed into a stupor. It’s a rare revelry in gloominess that’s almost hypnotic.
There’s a similar sense of calm to “Exhausted,” Foo Fighters’ melancholy six minute closer. It’s here that Grohl stretches out, trading snappy songwriting for buzzsaw guitar and extended feedback breakdowns. “What if the day had stayed in bed?” he hums, his voice barely audible amidst a sea of distortion. The album fades out on this moody riff, but its warm tones leave you feeling more wistful than depressed, a satisfying ending to a mosaic work.
“Dave Grohl could turn out to be the ‘90s punk equivalent of Tom Petty,” Alec Foege suggested in his 1995 Rolling Stone review of Foo Fighters. “Like Petty,” Foege wrote, “Grohl displays a good-natured humility that belies his talent for nailing the raw emotional substance that lies just beneath the surface of the average rock cliche.”
A quarter-century and eight additional albums later, it seems that Foege was right. Grohl, less tortured than his immortalized bandmate, found that pop success isn’t all that bad. Rather than bristling at the attention and releasing a harsh, In Utero-like follow-up, Foo Fighters’ music has grown increasingly palatable since that first record. There’s always a nice melody, invariably a big chorus, and usually a heavy dose of Grohl’s throat-shredding roar. Fewer and farther between are the musical detours that Foo Fighters takes — less shifts in dynamics, less bitterness. After all, it’s hard to be angsty as a millionaire family man who sells out stadiums every night. And while Foo Fighters records this side of the millennium are mostly full of jolly, straight-ahead Rawk songs, they’re certainly earworms. A hit like “Best Of You” definitely nails both emotional substance and rock cliche.
There was always a danger to punk rock, especially in bringing it to the masses — a threat that it would all come crashing down. With Cobain’s death, it did, and many of its survivors adjusted accordingly, focusing on that sliver of safety that pop hooks provide. Can you blame them?
The biggest critique of Foo Fighters nowadays is that all of their music sounds the same, but nothing sounds like that self-titled debut. Born out of tragedy and recorded with zero expectations, each of its songs shoot off in different directions, bursting with love for guitars and gratitude for musical expression. It’s a mummified document of the underground’s 15 minutes, and an electrifying reminder of what’s possible when you do it yourself.